BY JIM FLINK

ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN

Yappity-yap, and don’t talk back.  
Word on the street is Amazon has quietly snatched up voice-to-text start-up Yap.

Here’s the filing papers from the SEC, courtesy The Atlantic. It notes, this is Amazon’s first foray into voice recognition. Something closer to a whisper right now, compared to what’s happening at Apple and Google.

“The acquisition is particularly interesting given the prominence of Apple’s voice efforts and the depth of Google’s. In the everyone-does-everything war between Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, this could be a small step for Amazon into voice control, which it does not currently have in any of its products.”

Which is one small fly in the ointment. PC Mag says, this yap ought to start some buzz about Amazon’s tablet dreams.

“But there has been plenty of speculation that the 7-inch Kindle Fire is just the starting point on an ambitious Amazon tablet roadmap. Various sources have Amazon following up the Fire with either a 9-inch device or a 10-inch model, probably in 2012, and possibly running Android 4.0. Could the company squeeze whatever Yap serves up onto those rumored future tablets?”

But ReadWriteWeb says that takeaway is totally wrong. Yap is a text-to-speech translator. Siri actually searches the web. YAP simply can’t match Siri’s Aritificial Intelligence, or AI.

“Yap transcribed voicemail. Siri was based on a DARPA-funded military artificial intelligence project. With some consumers hesitating between the iPad and the Kindle Fire, there's bound to be a feature race. But speech-to-text input is one thing. The AI-powered future of search is another.”

So Apple appears to still have the lead with voice interaction. But All Things Digital says though Yap is just voice recognition now, think of the possibilities Amazon could bring to the table with its existing market infrastructure.

“We can hear it now:
– ‘Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?’
– ‘Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.’”

Transcript by Newsy.